The Mayor of Housing, My-ACE China has commended the present Rivers State Government on what he calls efforts at genuine Public Private Partnership (PPP) as opposed to political partnerships that he said ruins project execution.
This was a major fallout of the Real Estate Exhibition and Investment Summit just held in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, for the south-east and south-south which featured on how cost of building can be crashed.
Most speakers and participants including My-ACE China of the Mayor of Housing group, Mustapha Njie of TAF Africa Global, Bolaji Oshobukola of Odibola Properties Ltd, and Onyekachi Nzekwesi of Pineleaf Estate and Property Company, all appealed to the Minister of Housing and Urban Development who was represented at the summit to urgently execute the suggestions and recommendations from the summit.
China, regarded as the real estate success strategist, who articulated the measures in an interview after the summit, said the housing deficit in Nigeria is getting worse because the population is growing at a faster rate than developers can provide housing, now at 22 million.
On solution, he called for gas-powered industrial parks for indigenous building materials to crash cost of power. He said: “Indigenous building materials must be produced through what the government can call housing free trade zones with zero tax and free duty plus low power cost as indigenous building materials parks. As long as exchange rate is high, anything imported is out of the reach of the common man.
“The second is public private partnerships (PPP) that are private, not political. Non-political PPPs will help government to bring in private developers and practitioners with proven record just like River State has done so government can now subsidize the cost by providing land and title thus making the headache and cost of titling and land acquisition lower. When land acquisition and titling is taken off the equation, 40% of housing costs has already been removed.
“The last or the third of the solutions that the government will need to put in place is of course the ease of doing business, both financing, access to global funds. It includes matchmaking of value versus practitioner, enabling established real estate developers to have an ease of doing business and to encourage more people to want to invest in real estate. When they invest, supply will be high. When supply is high, prices fall.”
He said the three things; trade parks for building materials for them to be indigenous; land PPPs and land subsidization; and general ease of doing business, must be done fast. “Most times the banks don’t lend to real estate and it makes doing real estate business very difficult.”
If they do these three things, he said, real estate will be so attractive that everybody will jump into it, supply will surge and prices will fall.
The Mayor of Housing said: “It’s a movement that has left the green development and gone to what I call concrete desert because plants are expensive and Nigerians are usually in a hurry with a high test and high requirement for affordability.
“At the Mayor of Housing, we believe that trees and human beings must coexist because trees breathe out oxygen and take in carbon dioxide which humans breathe out.
“So we are championing the renaissance and the return to green living and I believe there should even be a legislation for the minimum number of trees that must go with a house so that if you have 1,000 units of houses, if a minimum number of trees is, for instance, five trees per house, you are developing 5,000 houses, you should have 25,000 trees. So, that awareness needs to be created and I am not just advising the government.
Need for Green Renaissance:
“We have a project, Alesa Highlands Green Sustainable Green Smart City. We are building the lowest density green versus living area. That means the green area will be higher than the living area and then we have to do a policy that encourages integrated horticulture.
“Integrated horticulture is horticulture for food, horticulture for medicine, and horticulture for beauty and if you look back at Nigeria, that is where we started. All our houses in the past had mangoes or guavas, ‘dogo yarrow’, lemongrass, but these days you hardly see that around houses.
“We need to have a renaissance, a green revolution of renaissance. I’m talking about green.”
He said it is appalling that Africa is the hottest, brightest continent in the world, but we are not leading in the solar surge. “When God blessed the world to turn the heat and the brightness of sun to energy, Nigeria and Africa should be leading the green revolution for solar energy because we have more sunlight than we need.
“We have more heat than we need. Converting this to energy is part of what we call sustainability and that’s part of what we are putting in our project that is going to be the first, ‘zero emissions project’.”
He said if we don’t have the luxury of getting all the advancement of the advanced world, we should at least have the luxury of our natural green environment that God blessed us with and retain those green environments.
“Before now, our villages did not become a desert before it became a village. We lived with our trees, we lived with our palm trees, we lived with our mango trees, and we lived with our green canopy.
“It is high time we not only returned to that green canopy, but made sure that the concept of little green gardens and agriculture returned because the greatest wealth of the earth is the earth and the power of the earth is the greenery. We must return to making Africa green.”
Talking about innovation and the role technology would play in the property market, he said technology is the new reality. “Technology is the new livelihood. Technology is the new neighborhood. Technology is the new environment. We can’t exist in the 21st century without technology. The role technology plays in real estate is to make real estate contemporary and livable.
“However, technologies that are not indigenalized and localized for adaptability might just be a facade of luxury that is not practicable.
“Our advocacy in the Mayor of Housing is that technology must play its role, but technology must be our servant and not our master because technology is an excellent servant for a terrible master. We must not copy and paste blindly what works in other clients without indigenizing it into our culture, into our environment and into our health requirement.”
So, he declared, technology must be healthy. Technology must be tailor-made or adaptable, which is bespoke. And technology must serve us and not us serving technology.
Advice to BusinessDay after the first edition:
China commended BusinessDay Media Limited for kick-starting the housing summit in the region and gave tips to make it better and bigger. “BusinessDay is too big for me to advise. Business Day is the biggest business newspaper in Africa. I only want BusinessDay to leverage their strength and bring other media houses to cover the event for the world to see the size of opportunity in the region.
He said Port Harcourt is the best destination for investment. “If you check the housing projection for 2026, Port Harcourt stands as a 30% growth prospect versus Lagos, 20% and Abuja, 15%. That news should be lauded by a global news agency like Business Day, collaborating with other news outfit to not only laud this, this is a wonderful conference I came for, but I’m surprised that the media houses here are the people of the region.
“If only South-South and Southeast region hears of this wonderful summit and BusinessDay would have only whistled. I want BusinessDay to not only blow their trumpet globally because I know how big their trumpet is, I want them to continue to blow that trumpet beyond this summit.
“This is because Port Harcourt is not only ready for business, South-South and South East zone is ripe, eager and green for business for the world to not only come to exploit, but for the world to come and nurture their dreams and BusinessDay can champion other media to come in and blow these trumpets.”
He appealed to the state government and investors to open the lid on Port Harcourt’s economy. “Open it. Loud it, especially to the investors. The best time to come is when the thing is green. Port Harcourt is very green. It’s like the bushes.
“When the bushes turn to the luscious, the luscious is lush money. Now that there are still bushes, every investor should rush in and turn their green to green money.”